Lopsided Teaching About Grace?

Cheap Grace!

A new reader of this blog is really getting beat up. Like me, this person emphasizes the grace that is ours through Jesus Christ our Lord as the defining and sustaining dynamic of the Christian faith.

The response to his writings? “When are you going to say something about obedience, commitment, and morality?”

The unspoken charge? “You just want the Christian life to be easy and cheap!”

I assure you that is not what grace-teachers believe. There’s nothing cheap about grace, nothing soft about grace, nothing easy about grace.

What about the Cross of Christ is cheap, soft, or easy?

Grace is costly to the one offering it. But if it’s going to be grace, it has to be free to the recipient!

But here is what most objectors to grace teaching miss, in my opinion: The awesome power of grace. When we receive the life of Christ, eternal life, by grace through faith, it’s not only powerful enough to get us to heaven, it’s also powerful enough to change us to live like Christ on earth.

This is why it’s so absurd to receive grace and then try to pay Him back with works. What do you have to offer? Everything good about you was put into you by His grace. And that, not your obedience, not your commitment, not your morality, is what needs to be released in your life if you want to glorify Him.

My prayer for those who mistrust grace is the same prayer Paul had for his beloved Ephesians: “That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height–to know the love of Christ which passes all knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:17-19).

Now to Him who is abled to do exceedingly and abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Jesus Christ to all generations, forever and ever. Amen” (Ephesians 3:20-21).